XVII. SHADOWS OF THE COMING RACE

XVIII. THE MODERN HEP! HEP! HEP!



I.


LOOKING INWARD.

It is my habit to give an account to myself of the characters I meet
with: can I give any true account of my own? I am a bachelor, without
domestic distractions of any sort, and have all my life been an
attentive companion to myself, flattering my nature agreeably on
plausible occasions, reviling it rather bitterly when it mortified me,
and in general remembering its doings and sufferings with a tenacity
which is too apt to raise surprise if not disgust at the careless
inaccuracy of my acquaintances, who impute to me opinions I never held,
express their desire to convert me to my favourite ideas, forget whether
I have ever been to the East, and are capable of being three several
times astonished at my never having told them before of my accident in
the Alps, causing me the nervous shock which has ever since notably
diminished my digestive powers. Surely I ought to know myself better
than these indifferent outsiders can know me; nay, better even than my
intimate friends, to whom I have never breathed those items of my inward
experience which have chiefly shaped my life.

Yet I have often been forced into the reflection that even the
acquaintances who are as forgetful of my biography and tenets as they